Traffic crawled on Storrow Drive last week as a midsized storm blanketed the region with snow.
(David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)
The gridlock that paralyzed Greater Boston last week during a midsized snowstorm prompted many residents and officials to ask whether there is any hope for the Hub if a terrorist strike or disaster ever triggered a full-scale evacuation order.
The answer: maybe.
City and state public-safety officials insist the storm was nothing like a trial run for an evacuation. And, as angry as many people were about their endless commutes, they might well have been shocked by seeing the transportation version of martial law at work.
What might an actual evacuation look like? Police and National Guard members deployed at every intersection to turn arteries such as Beacon Street and the Jamaicaway into speedways with no turns allowed. Neighborhoods blockaded and residents and workers ordered to take shelter in basements, schools, and churches. Dump trucks and troopers walling off Massachusetts Turnpike ramps to turn the toll road into a one-way, eight-lane westbound expressway from Boston, with no one allowed to exit until Westborough or beyond.
"What happened Thursday was not an evacuation, and it's apples and oranges to compare them," said Boston Police Superintendent Robert Dunford. "There's a number of contingency plans that we have that were never put into place, emergency procedures and restrictions and isolations and closings that would have taken place."
Juliette N. Kayyem, the state's undersecretary of homeland security, said most people probably do not appreciate how drastic an evacuation is.
"Evacuation planning," she said, "is closing off exits. It is: You do not stop. You do not go to the Christmas party. We will pull that trigger if we need to get you out of harm's way or keep you out of harm's way. We are not going to do it for a winter storm in New England."
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Boston set up a network of evacuation routes out of the city, marked by round signs. They include major highways and parkways, as well as Commonwealth Avenue, the Jamaicaway, Hyde Park Avenue, and routes that have not been publicly announced and marked with signs. By mid-February, state officials expect to complete a more detailed plan for how Boston's evacuation routes would mesh with a regionwide evacuation plan, Kayyem said.
Many details about how those streets would be used in an evacuation are kept secret, because officials don't want to help terrorists who might consider an attack to determine where to inflict a second or third strike to maximize chaos and death.
"A lot of planning has been done here around how you would" turn eastbound lanes into a westbound evacuation route, said Mac Daniel, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. "But for national security reasons that I think everyone can understand, we can't give out a lot of details."
City and state transportation officials say the fundamental breakdown that happened Thursday was that tens if not hundreds of thousands of workers left work almost simultaneously, just as snow was arriving, in a storm that started out much stronger than expected. Roads were quickly covered with snow before snowplows could get to work.
Hundreds of motorists defied the "don't block the box" rule and pushed past red lights into intersections, causing gridlock from the North End to the South End and from South Boston to the Fenway.
In contrast, any kind of terrorism-related evacuation would be much more limited, Dunford said, barring a nightmare scenario like a multimissile nuclear attack on Boston.
"The most probable case we'd be looking at is localized evacuations" in the blocks most directly affected by an explosion, fire, or radioactive or biological bomb," he said. During an evacuation, people in many neighborhoods would be ordered by authorities to stay put, to reduce traffic thwarting the evacuation of Boston.
"The lesson we have seen from emergency preparedness history is that major urban populations rarely have to evacuate," Kayyem said. "Parts of urban populations do. A lot of our planning then is: Don't move, stay put, and shelter in place or at sites we have identified."
Stephen J. Murphy, a Boston city councilor who heads the council's Public Safety Committee, said that as bad as Thursday's snowstorm was, "I don't believe for a minute that if we had a terrorist attack, we would have been playing by the same rules. We'd be calling the shots on when people are able to leave."
Having seen much of the city's planning for an evacuation, Murphy said, "I think we're much more ready than what the snowstorm would indicate."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
